Solana : Governance Passes to the Hands of SOL Holders

Solana has activated a formal on-chain governance system, requiring 100,000 SOL staked to submit a proposal. Validators thus lose their decision-making monopoly, now shared with their delegators. Does this new voting power permanently change the network’s balance? 

How do the new Solana governance proposals work?

Solana formalized its on-chain governance on June 30, 2026, as shown by a repository published on GitHub. The mechanism, called Solana Governance Proposals (SGP), allows any validator holding at least 100,000 SOL immobilized, approximately 7.7 million dollars, to submit a question on the network’s direction, an evolution that revives the debate on the true decentralization of major blockchains.

Each proposal must first gather 15% of the active stakes before being submitted to a vote. This filter prevents saturating the network with marginal topics, while allowing main developers to deploy regular changes without organizing a systematic referendum.

The vote then extends over several epochs, these periods of about two days that pace Solana’s operations. The network adopts a proposal as soon as it receives a two-thirds supermajority among voters, abstentions excluded, without a minimum participation threshold. 

The protocol records each count on-chain and verifies it using a Merkle proof, a method that confirms the inclusion of a vote in the final result without recalculating everything.

Why is this governance change happening now?

Solana until now handled two questions in the same vague process: whether to act, and how. The SGP now separates these two steps. A favorable vote on a proposal opens the way to one or more Solana Improvement Documents, where main developers then handle the technical details.

The other novelty concerns the role given to delegators. These users, who stake their SOL with a validator without running a node themselves, can now cancel or replace that validator’s vote with their own choice, weighted according to their stake. The Solana Foundation presents this mechanism as a guarantee of sovereignty for token holders.

This launch comes as Solana experiences a renewed interest from investors. SOL indeed increased by about 16% last week to nearly 78 dollars, one of the few major tokens to gain in an overall bearish market.

In summary, Solana crosses a structural milestone by opening its decision-making process to validators and their delegators. The separation between strategic direction and technical execution, combined with the sovereignty granted to stakers, could redefine how the network evolves. It remains to observe the first proposals submitted to vote in the coming weeks.